The Keeper | Page 9

a hole and lining it with the sleeping robes.
The sky was clear when he woke, and a pale yellow light was glowing in the east. For a
while he lay huddled with the dog, stiff and miserable, and then he forced himself to his
feet. He ate, and fed Brave, and then checked his rifle and made his pack.
He was sure, now, that he had a plan that would succeed. He could reach the place where
Vahr and the Southrons would come up long before they did, and be waiting for them. In
his imagination, he could see them coming up in single file, Vahr Farg's son in the lead,
and he could imagine himself hidden behind a mound of snow, the ice-staff upright to
brace his left hand and the forestock of the rifle resting on his outthrust thumb and the
butt against his shoulder. The first bullet would be for Vahr. He could shoot all of them,
one after another, that way....
He stopped, looking in chagrined incredulity at the trucks in front of him--the tracks he
knew so well, of one man in sealskin boots and three men with ribbed plastic soles. Why,
it couldn't be! They should be no more than half way up the long ravine, between the two
tongues of the Ice-Father, ten miles to the north. But here they were, on the back of the
Ice-Father and crossing to the west ahead of him. They must have climbed the sheer wall
of ice, only a few miles from where he had dragged himself and Brave to the top. Then he
remembered the negatron-blasts he had heard. While he had been chopping footholds
with a hatchet, they had been smashing tons of ice out of their way.
"Well, Brave," he said mildly. "Old Keeper wasn't so smart, after all, was he? Come on,
Brave."
The thieves were making good time. He read that from the tracks --straight, evenly
spaced, no weary heel-dragging. Once or twice, he saw where they had stopped for a
brief rest. He hoped to see their fire in the evening.
He didn't. They wouldn't have enough fuel to make a big one, or keep it burning long.

But in the morning, as he was breaking camp, he saw black smoke ahead.
A few times, he had been in air-boats, and had looked down on the back of the Ice-Father,
and it had looked flat. Really, it was not. There were long ridges, sheer on one side and
sloping gently on the other, where the ice had overridden hills and low mountains, or had
cracked and one side had pushed up over the other. And there were deep gullies where
the prevailing winds had scooped away loose snow year after year for centuries, and
drifts where it had piled, many of them higher than the building-mounds of the ancient
cities. But from a distance, as from above, they all blended into a featureless white
monotony.
At last, leaving a tangle of cliffs and ravines, he looked out across a broad stretch of
nearly level snow and saw, for the first time, the men he was following. Four tiny dots, so
far that they seemed motionless, strung out in single file. Instantly, he crouched behind a
swell in the surface and dragged Brave down beside him. One of them, looking back,
might see him, as he saw them. When they vanished behind a snow-hill, he rose and
hastened forward, to take cover again. He kept at this all day; by alternately resting and
running, be found himself gaining on them, and toward evening, he was within
rifle-range. The man in the lead was Vahr Farg's son; even at that distance he recognized
him easily. The others were Southrons, of course; they wore quilted garments of cloth,
and quilted hoods. The man next to Vahr, in blue, carried a rifle, as Vahr did. The man in
yellow had only an ice-staff, and the man in green, at the rear, had the Crown on his pack,
still in the bearskin bundle.
He waited, at the end of the day, until he saw the light of their fire. Then he and Brave
circled widely around their camp, and stopped behind a snow-ridge, on the other side of
an open and level stretch a mile wide. He dug the sleeping-hole on the crest of the ridge,
making it larger than usual, and piled up a snow breastwork in front of it, with an
embrasure through which he could look or fire without being seen.
Before daybreak, he was awake and had his pack made, and when he saw the smoke of
the thieves' campfire, he was lying behind his breastwork, the rifle resting on its folded
cover, muzzle toward the smoke. He lay for a